1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to autonomous underwater robots, and more specifically, to systems and methods for building autonomous underwater robots and remotely piloted underwater robotic vehicles
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Just as robotic vehicles have proven their effectiveness as an alternative to manned space exploration, researchers in Oceanography, Sub-Sea Oil and Gas and Mineral Production, Fisheries Management, Marine Environmental Pollution Management, Marine Biological Diversity Surveys, Marine Salvage, Underwater Search and Rescue, and other related fields have found underwater robotic vehicles an effective alternative to sending divers into the water.
Several companies manufacture underwater robotic systems. The primary users of these robots are the sub-sea oil and gas companies, whose profits may justify the robots' high cost. The largest of the marine science institutions such as Scripps Oceanographic Institution, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, as well as large governmental agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also employ such vehicles for deep ocean research, although in far smaller numbers than in the oil field. The typical high prices reflect their high performance, providing reliable maneuverability, video tele-presence, and ability to manipulate construction tools sometimes thousands of feet below the ocean surface under some of the harshest environmental conditions on earth.
A few companies make relatively low performance systems for a much smaller cost, and many of these are used by municipal search and rescue teams, or for sub-surface ship inspection and other less demanding shallow water tasks. But even at the “low end” those commercial underwater robotic systems exceed the budgets of the majority of potential users of underwater robotic systems.
A second problem exists for these potential users. The least expensive of the commercial systems tend to be single purpose vehicles of very simple design and thus the least flexible in terms of configuration. Many researchers require vehicles with more options for attaching instrument payloads, different cameras, more thruster characteristics, etc., than are present in any commercial systems they can afford. But no commercially available Underwater Robotic System offers its users freedom of choice, at a modular level, over the mechanical configuration of their system (e.g., how many thrusters for degrees of freedom of locomotion), what computational hardware is used to control the system (e.g., a full-function Intel-based computer running either Windows or Linux or a small 8 or 16-bit microcontroller) and whether that processor is programmed in C, Java, Python, or another language. Changing any of these would usually mean switching manufacturers or buying a second system to fit the new requirements. No inexpensive ‘build-by-menu and reconfigure-at-will’ underwater robotic solution exists for those who need broad freedom in design and configuration.
As a result, most potential users of underwater tele-presence robots who need a cheap, simple, easily re-configured system must currently design and build their own underwater robotic system from scratch; this is difficult for even experienced researchers and usually prohibitively so for the inexperienced. While such a do-it-yourself method allows the system to be tailored exactly to the mission requirements at hand, costs can easily exceed the those of a comparable commercial system when design and test time spent dealing with the inadequacies of a leaky, unreliable prototype are factored in. And unless modularity, extendibility, and re-configurability are carefully thought out and designed into the prototype, these scratch-built systems usually fail to provide the flexibility for expansion and re-configuration that the user will soon wish for to meet new performance requirements or to attach new payloads.